Eponymous Foods: Snacks and Sweets

This edition of Eponymous Foods features a beautiful dessert, some myth busting about a very common food’s invention, and a very sweet finish with a much-loved candy. 

Research:

• “160 Years of Neuhaus History.” Neuhaus Chocolates. https://www.neuhauschocolates.com/en_US/history/History.html
• Beaton, Paula. “The Origin of the Crepe is Shrouded in Mystery.” The Daily Meal. June 3, 2023. https://www.thedailymeal.com/1302745/origin-crepes/
• “Belgian Pralines: A sweet but not so short history.” Discover Benelux. https://www.discoverbenelux.com/belgian-pralines-a-sweet-but-not-so-short-history/
• Charpentier, Henri and Boyden Sparkes. “Life à la Henri: Being the Memories of Henri Charpentier.” Modern Library. 2001.
• Fertel, R. “praline.” In “The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets.” Oxford University Press. 2015. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10
• Grosley, Pierre Jean, and Thomas Nugent (tr). “A Tour to London, Volume I.” Lockyer Davis. 1772. Accessed online: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_a-tour-to-london-or-ne_grosley-pierre-jean_1772_1/mode/2up
• “John Montagu.” American Battlefield Trust. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/john-montagu
• “Maison de la Prasline Mazet.” France Today. June 14, 2012. https://francetoday.com/food-drink/maison_de_la_prasline_mazet/#fm-popup-modal-close
• “Making Crepes Suzette.” Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts. July 31, 2014. https://www.escoffier.edu/blog/baking-pastry/making-crepes-suzette/
• “The main ingredient of Crepe Suzette.” Le Parisien. March 20, 2016. https://www.leparisien.fr/archives/l-ingredient-principal-de-la-crepe-suzette-grand-marnier-mais-pourquoi-grand-20-03-2016-5642685.php
• “Sandwich celebrates 250th anniversary of the sandwich.” BBC. May 12, 2012. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-kent-18010424
• Stradley, Linda. “Sandwich History.” What’s Cooking America. https://whatscookingamerica.net/history/sandwichhistory.htm
• Sybertz, Alyssa. “What are pralines, exactly?” Readers Digest. July 17, 2023. https://www.rd.com/article/what-are-pralines/
• Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne. “A History of Food.” Blackwell. 2008.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, it's been like
five whole months since we had an eponymous foods episode.
So long. It isn't really, but it feels like longer.

(00:24):
And it took me a while to figure out how
long it had been. And I love them. And this
one was inspired by a thing I will happily tell
you on Friday because it made me laugh, or maybe
i'll tell you in the course of the show. Who
knows anything can happen. But we're going to talk about
three eponymous foods, and today we have one that's a
really beautiful dessert. We're going to do some myth busting

(00:46):
about a very common foods invention, and we'll have a
very sweet finish with a much loved candy. We're going
to start with crape susette. This is a buttery, citrusy
dish featuring the classic French crapes, which you may also
hear people say creps that's dipped into a syrupy sauce

(01:08):
and then set on fire. And then that very showy
preparation is often performed at the table in restaurants. The
crapes are then plated, sometimes while still holding a little
bit of blue flame, and then sauce is drizzled on
top of that. And the main claimant to the dish's
invention is a French chef named Henri Charpentier. His life story,

(01:31):
as told in his biography Life a Lare, is a
wild one. It is full of thrilling encounters with important
and famous people from the time he was very young.
And it's sort of cute because he seems to recognize
that this seems all unbelievable, because he notes at the
beginning of the work that it sounds both incredible and boastful,

(01:51):
but he reassures the reader quote I am of Nice
and WEENI swas do not boast. Charpontier was born, as
he noted, in Nice in eighteen eighty and then spent
his early childhood in Conte. His father, who had been
a lawyer, died after falling from a horse just a
few days after Anri was born, and that left Ari's

(02:13):
still teenage mother in a state of grief and also
financial uncertainty. Those circumstances led to him being fostered by
another family, headed by a man named Roussoon Camu, and
that's how he moved to Conte. According to Aunri, his
birth mother last visited him when he was either five
or six, and then she died not long afterward. He

(02:36):
described his foster mother's cooking as deeply influential on him,
noting quote, we had little money in the Camu family,
but we had big appetites. However, my mama Cameu. When
she had nothing, she could still make something. At Christmas time.
Her bread would acquire a smoother texture, which was softer
to the touch and had an exciting flavor. How is

(02:59):
it done? Two spoons of olive oil, two of sugar,
and four of butter worked into the ordinary bread dough.
But his memo, Cameu also had an adult son who
didn't live with the family. He lived in Nice and
his name was Jean, and Jean was a student of
a name we often have mentioned on the podcast, and
that is Augusta Scoffier. When all re visited Jean at

(03:23):
his work in the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo, he
immediately begged to stay there. And at the time, Auree
was only seven, and Jean told him he needed to
grow a bit more. He wanted to work at the hotel,
and the family also needed financial help, which is how
in eighteen ninety, when he was still just a kid
of ten, Alrie got a job on the French riviera

(03:44):
at the Hotel Cape Martin as a page boy. His
foster brother, Jean had become the chef there and had
arranged for Auri to work and stay with him, and
Allri wrote quote, if you think it queer that one
should begin the career of restaurateur while yet so young, ung,
I would remind you that the admirals of the English
began as young and did not have so much to

(04:05):
learn he was. He wrote very struck by the difference
in lifestyle for even the kitchen staff, as compared to
his life that he had been living with his foster family,
and wrote quote, today, when I think of the poverty
of comte and the richness with which I was in contact,
I can cry afresh from the original emotion. In his

(04:26):
time at the hotel, are made some errors that made
some of the senior staff dislike him, But because he
was just a small boy, a lot of the guests
who came through found him very charming. He made bigger
tips than a lot of his older colleagues, and a
number of people and long term guests treated him with
a lot of kindness. He also started to learn more

(04:48):
about cooking from watching his stepbrother as he prepared the dishes.
He witnessed and assisted when nobles and royals were served.
He met people like JP Morgan and the Vanderbilts, and
he said that he witnessed a meeting between Queen Victoria
of England and Empress Elizabeth of Austria. He described hoarding

(05:08):
all of his tips from all of these people and
then proudly delivering a small fortune to his foster mother.
When the travel season ended and he visited home, there's
a really sweet passage in his biography where he talks
about like he felt like the biggest man on earth
as he walked through called knowing that he had changed

(05:29):
the lives of his family. He moved on to other
hotels along with his foster brother following the hospitality season around,
and he was even sent by Jean to other hotels
to learn from the chefs there. Most of these were
positions granted young charpentier as favors to Jean Cammeus because
he was a pretty well known chef at this point,

(05:49):
and these were not always kitchen positions. He worked in
just about every low level job a person could in
the hospitality industry. And then when Alri was twelve, he
was sent to England to learn to speak English and
to learn from chefs there. After abruptly quitting his arranged
job in London due to some poor treatment he felt

(06:11):
on the part of his boss, he sought out Augusta Scoffier,
who was head chef at the Hotel Savoy there and
he was given a job there, first as a broom boy,
although he quickly rose through the ranks to assistant waiter,
but he was fired by the matre d and he
soon found himself living on the street. He starved to
the point that he almost died, and a policeman found

(06:31):
him and brought him to a hospital, and he stayed
there for a month while he recuperated. And then once
he recovered, and there is a great dog story connected
to all of this that we could talk about, on Friday,
he returned to France. All of this leads up to
the invention of crape Susette. The fourteen year old Chapontier
was working at the Cafe de Peri in Monte Carlo

(06:53):
as an assistant waiter when Edward, Prince of Wales got
into the habit of going there for lunch every day. This,
of course, is Albert Edward, son of Queen Victoria, who
was nicknamed Bertie and would become King Edward the Seventh.
One day, when the Prince came in, aure was assigned
to wait on him, and according to Auree's account, the

(07:15):
Prince and his party totaled eight men and one young
lady who was the daughter of one of those men.
And then the details of who all these folks were
they're not recorded beyond that. For this particular lunch, Auree
told the Prince of Wales that he had come up
with a sweet dish just for him. He was planning
to make a variation of the French pancake or crep

(07:37):
that his foster mother had made for him when he
was young. She he described cooked strips of lemon and
orange peel that had been soaked in syrup along with
her crapes, and he thought that he could make an
upscale version of that dish. Incidentally, aure also gave his
recipe for crapes in the course of his narrative. Three eggs,

(07:57):
two tablespoons of flour, a tablespoonful water, a tablespoon of milk,
and a pinch of salt, mixed to the consistency of
thick olive oil or a thin cream. Then melt quote
a piece of sweet butter as big as one joint
of your thumb, And when the butter bubbles, pour in
the batter and spread it quickly to cover the bottom
of the pan. He continues, quote, but keep the pan moving,

(08:20):
for it is a tender substance, that paste. And then
after a minute you flip his crape several times until
they're nicely browned. And then you fold in half and
half again, quote like a lady's handkerchief. Charpontier also describes
the way he prepared his sauce, which includes several kinds
of sweet cordial alcohols. He did this ahead of time

(08:42):
to make the dish, noting quote, for years, I have
kept gallons of this sousette butter on hand, ready for use.
But on that day, when I worked to please the
Prince of Whales, I had not cultivated the invention to
its present standard. It was quite by accident, as I
worked in front of a chafing dish, that the cordials
caught fire. I thought I was ruined. The Prince and

(09:04):
his friends were waiting. How could I begin all over?
But just on a whim, a'redecided to find out what
the result of that fire was. Continuing quote I tasted it.
It was, I thought, the most delicious melody of sweet
flavors I had ever tasted. I still think so that
accident of the flame was precisely what was needed to

(09:26):
bring all those various instruments into one harmony of taste.
I plunged my supply of folded pancakes into the boiling sauce.
I submerged them, I turned them deftly, and then again, inspired,
I added two more ponies of the blend of cordials. Again,
my wide pan was alive with blue and orange flame.

(09:46):
And as the colors died from the pan, I looked
up to see the Prince of Whales. Are served the
dish to the Prince, who he called the world's most
perfect gentleman, And he describes the reception quote, he I
ate the pancakes with a fork, but he used a
spoon to capture the remaining syrup. He asked me the
name of that which he had eaten with so much relish.

(10:09):
I told him it was to be called crapes Princess.
He recognized that the pancake controlled the gender, and that
this was a compliment designed for him, But he protested
with mock ferocity that there was a lady present. She
was alert and rose to her feet, and holding her
little skirt wide with her hands, she made him a curtsy.

(10:29):
Will you? Said, His Majesty changed Crape's Princess to crape Susette.
This was born and baptized. This confection, one taste of
which I really believe would reform a cannibal into a
civilized gentleman. The next day I received a present from
the Prince, a jeweled ring, a panama hat, and a cane.

(10:50):
So obviously we have this very detailed account of this invention,
but also, of course it's not the only version. There
have been detractors to Charpontier's story, noting that he was
so very young at the time that it just seems dubious.
There are also versions that suggest that Auri had sanitized
the story somewhat, and that the Susette that inspired the

(11:12):
name was not an innocent young daughter of a friend,
but was actually the Prince's mistress. There is yet another
version of the story that credits Escoffier with creating the dish,
though the Prince of Wales was still in the mix
as the guest who first ate it, and that version
sometimes German actress Suzanne Reichenberg, who apparently went by Suzette,

(11:35):
is supposed to be the namesake. It kind of seems
as though some of the confusion may have come from
the brief period before the dish was invented, when Charpontier
worked for Escoffier. Worth noting here. The Augusta. Scaffier School
of Culinary Arts credits Charpontier and the story in his biography.
In its online recipe for Crepe Susette. Coming up, we're

(11:57):
going to talk about a name that now applies to
a whole food category and some of the falsehoods that
go along with it. But first we will pause for
a sponsor break. Okay, we have to straighten out the
sandwich situation. Yeah, so many people have asked for this

(12:20):
specific thing. I almost included it on our previous eponymous
foods where we talked about sandwiches, but it is too
much and it would have pushed one of the sandwiches out,
and frankly I wanted to talk about hot brown. But
so it's often repeated that John Montague, fourth Earl of
Sandwich invented the sandwich in the eighteenth century. That is

(12:41):
not quite right, but he is a big part of
the story, so for context. John Montague was born on
November thirteenth, seventeen eighteen in London. His father, Viscount Hitchingbrook,
died when John was just four years old, and John's mother,
Elizabeth Papa Montague, sent him away to school at Eton
and remarried, and she was largely absent from her son's life.

(13:04):
Though he was of noble birth, he became a ward
of the Court of Chancery because his mom had pretty
much cut him off as well as his brother. He
inherited the title Earl of Sandwich at the age of
ten when his grandfather died, but that title did not
come with wealth, and he was also caught in this
sort of tricky position where his grandmother, who did have

(13:25):
some financial benefit for him, held any support over his head.
Contingent on him withholding support for King George the Second,
and then he also struggled to find footing socially with
his peers because of his family's association with the out
of favor Stuart's. He just kind of didn't have any
place where he was like safe to be whoever he

(13:45):
wanted to be. After Eton, John attended Trinity College, Cambridge,
and then began a grand tour of Europe, during which
he met Dorothy Fane. The two of them married in
seventeen forty one and had several children before Dorothy developed
mental health issues and became a ward of the Chancery.
Montague also had a nearly twenty year relationship with a

(14:08):
woman named Martha Ray, including several children before another suitor
killed her. Plenty of drama to go around, and during
his life, Montague held a lot of important posts with
varying degrees of success. He was first Lord of the
Admiralty in the seventeen fifties and then again beginning in

(14:28):
seventeen seventy one. He'd gotten fired in that first one.
He was deeply criticized for a variety of things in
this role. He was, for example, in Boston during the
Boston tea party, and he watched the whole thing happen
while doing nothing. And then when the French entered the
conflict that would eventually erupt into the Revolutionary War, the

(14:49):
British navy was ill equipped to handle the challenge for
which he was blamed because he was in charge of that.
Views of Montague have varied throughout history, with some seeing
him as a total blank wunderer and others is more
of a scapegoat who was actually trying to do his
best in a system that worked largely against his efforts.
But he was noteworthy enough in his time to have

(15:11):
become the namesake of a style of food that had
been around for centuries. So how did that happen? The
idea that he invented the sandwich is based primarily on
a piece of writing in a travelogue by Pierre Jean Gurli.
Gurlei wrote his account Loandre in seventeen seventy and it
was translated into an English language multi volume publication called

(15:35):
A Tour to London or New Observations on London and
Its Inhabitants in seventeen seventy two, and volume one of
the translation, in a section that discusses the gambling habits
of London. There's the following passage quote, A Minister of
State passed four and twenty hours at a public gaming table,

(15:55):
so absorbed in play that during the whole time he
had no subsistence but a bit of beef between two
slices of toasted bread, which he ate without ever quitting
the game. This new dish grew highly in vogue during
my residence in London. It was called by the name
of the minister who invented it. But there are a
couple of problems here. One, the eighteenth century was hardly

(16:19):
the first time someone thought of putting bread and fillings
together in the style that we would call a sandwich.
We've talked about food history so often in the ways
that people would combine bread with some of their kind
of food as a walk around meal before that. It
completely ignores, like all of the Middle Eastern flatbread culture
that had gone on, and all of that culinary work.

(16:41):
And the other problem is that we don't really know
where Growley got his information, and his account has been
dismissed as gossip by various historians over the years. While
Montague retains a reputation throughout history for a variety of vices.
All of these years later, we still don't really know
whether he had this infamous streak of gambling that kept

(17:03):
him from leaving the table. It is just as possible
that he requested the dish that would become known as
the sandwich while working, or maybe that none of those
things happened, and it doesn't appear that there was a
moment when someone said we should name this after you.
It seems more likely that people just started referring to

(17:23):
meat in a hand held bread delivery vehicle as wanting
to have the same as sandwich, and then over time
it just started to be used as sort of a
slang until it became the way this combination of foods
was known. Historian and scholar Edward Gibbon wrote in his
journal in seventeen sixty two that he had seen men

(17:45):
eating quote, a bit of cold meat, which Gibbon refers
to as a sandwich. This is the first known use
of the word in writing, and it is concurrent with
Montague's life. He would have been about forty four in
seventeen sixty two and write in between his two stints
as First Lord of the Admiralty Mark Morton, writing for
the periodical Gastronomy in two thousand and four, found himself

(18:09):
down a rabbit hole trying to find out what people
called meat between two slices of bread before it was
called a sandwich, at least in the more European world.
Summating his research, he writes, quote, the sandwich appears to
have been simply known as bread and meat or bread
and cheese. These two phrases are found throughout English drama

(18:31):
from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For example, in an
anonymous late sixteenth century play called Love and Fortune, a
young man pleads for a piece of bread and meat
for God's sake. Around the same time, in the Old
Wives Tale by George Peel, a character confesses I took
a piece of bread and cheese and came my way.

(18:52):
In twenty twelve, the town of Sandwich in Kent, which
sits within Montague's earldom, held a celebration in owner of
the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the first known
use of the word sandwich in its culinary sense. As
part of its Sandwich Celebration Festival, there were plans for
re enactments of Montague requesting a sandwich. There were also

(19:14):
plans for sandwich making competitions and other entertainments. The eleventh
Earl of Sandwich, also named John Montague, was on hand
for the festivities and told the press quote, it's bizarre
that such an important food item should be named after us.
My ancestor, the fourth Earl, could never have imagined that
his simple invention would spawn a multi billion dollar industry

(19:36):
employing hundreds of thousands of people in this country. Sam Bompus,
who owns a company that creates food and beverage art
and was part of the festival's planning effort, noted to
the press quote eating of record at the time was
service a la francaise, where all the food went on
a table at the same time, and there was an
elaborate ritual of carving, aided by troops of servants. What

(20:00):
you have with the sandwich is the shock of informality.
He was a daring man to eat in such a way,
coming from his social background. Other people were probably eating
in that way anyway, but they were people who weren't
written about. I really like that. He points out that
that's the important thing is that here is a man
with a title who's like, yeah, eat with my hands,

(20:22):
I don't need a name and fork, and that really
being kind of the more important part of the story.
But as promised, we are going to finish off with
a very sugary treat. But before we do that, we
will hear from some of the sponsors that keep stuff
you missed in history class going. All right, as a

(20:47):
little dessert, We're going to finish with a sweet treat
that probably doesn't jump out to you as an eponymous food.
The preleen didn't jump out to me either till I
accidentally discovered that. There are of course a lot of
variations in this tale, and the origin of the praleene
dates back to the sixteen hundreds, so documentation is in
pretty short supply. And yes, absolutely there are variations in pronunciation.

(21:13):
If you visit Louisiana, for example, you are likely to
hear it as proleen, and it places like Georgia or
Tennessee and others praleine is a bit more common. Both
are fine, everyone knows what you're talking about. Uh. Kind
of goes back to the whole thing too, where some
people say pcan and some people say p can. Yeah,
you know what they're talking about. So it's cool. Just

(21:33):
appreciate the musicality of difference. Yeah, you don't mean to
write to us to tell us that we made your
soul diye or your ears bleed if you prefer the
other one. But as you'll see, one pronunciation does harken
a little more closely back to the treat's origin point,
which is France, and you will see that it has
kind of evolved into the name it has today. So

(21:54):
all of the varying stories do share the commonality of
who Praleens are named for, and that Cesar de Choiso,
first Duke of Chueisoui Comte du Plessis Prelein. He was
born in sixteen oh two and was a diplomat, a
soldier and a marshal of France, meaning that he was
a general who was recognized for achievement or distinction. That

(22:18):
was an honor that was bestowed on him in sixteen
forty five. That came during the thirty Years of War
which he had served in. He also supported the monarchy
in the Fronde, it's that series of civil wars that
we've talked about on the show before. He was rewarded
for that in the Court of Louis the fourteenth He

(22:38):
helped negotiate the Treaty of Dover between England and France
in sixteen seventy. But the part of Chuishoi's life that's
germane to this episode is in the sixteen thirties, when
in his employee was a man named Clement Lasagne, although
some sources say Clement Jalouseau. In either case, Clement was
his officier de bouche, officer of the mouth, known more

(23:01):
commonly as his cook. The term scheft wasn't really happening yet,
and Clement, through ingenuity or accident, or perhaps a combination
of the two, is said to have created a delicious
form of caramelized almonds and named it for his boss. Magelun.
Toussaint Sema wrote of the creation of the praline in

(23:22):
her book A History of Food in two thousand and eight. Quote,
one day, in the servants quarters of his residence at Montarghie,
Lazan found his children caramelizing almonds stolen from the kitchen.
The wonderful odor emanating from the spot where the little
cooks were at work, gave away their guilty secret and
its delicious results. His mouth watering Lazam promised to keep

(23:47):
quiet in exchange for some of the sweetmeats. He perfected
the recipe a ticket to the court of Louis the thirteenth,
where the confection became known as Prala, not that the
Duke himself had anything to do with inventing it. Another
story holds that the recipe was the result of clumsiness
on the part of an apprentice who dropped some almonds

(24:07):
into caramel made with gattine honey. A different version of
this story suggests that Clement saw a kitchen boy eating
leftover caramel and almonds together, and the cook came up
with the idea to combine these as a candy. As
a complete side note here, I read about the idea

(24:29):
of children caramelizing almonds, and I was like, they shouldn't
be handling hot molten sugar. But that's a different issue entirely.
In the early days of the Praline story, sugar was
not something that was readily available to everyone, so they
kind of stayed a treat for the upper class. But
as sugar became more commonly available, Clement retired from his

(24:53):
job with Schwazoi to the town of molt Derghie, where
he opened up a confectionery shop called Maison de la
Braline and sold his caramelized almonds there. These candy coated almonds,
known as prana, made their way across the Atlantic as
French colonists and clergy moved to Louisiana and specifically to
New Orleans. Ursuline nuns are often credited with bringing the

(25:16):
recipe over in seventeen twenty seven, as they were in
charge of the young women known as the fix A
la Cassette, who came to be known more colloquially as
the casket girls. These were women who were sent by
King Louis the fourteenth to be wives for the colonists.
We talked about them in twenty eighteen in our episode

(25:36):
six Impossible Episodes Deja Vu in the US and Canada.
Those are all episodes that were almost the same story
as one that we'd already told in one or the
other of those places. Once the nuns and other people
of France made their way to New Orleans, they wanted
to replicate the treat from their home back in Europe,
but there was a problem and that almonds were not

(25:59):
really plentiful on the Gulf coast, but there were pecans,
so they made a substitution, so over time the recipe
for preleines shifted to include a cream component. Today you
can find recipes that use heavy cream, some that use
evaporated milk, others that use buttermilk, and even other variations
on ingredients to give the finished candy that rich flavor

(26:22):
and that very unique texture. Many names for the candy
also emerged, so like if you look at cookbooks from
the eighteen hundreds, you can find a whole lot of
spellings because the word was anglicized by different people at
different times, not referencing one another, and letters got dropped
or added. There is even one that includes a W
to spell it prawlings like crawfish. Today, New Orleans still

(26:49):
boasts incredible praleins made in a variety of ways. You
can buy them in fancy shops or from street vendors.
But Paris also still has Maison de la Pree, although
that's not in its original location and has changed hands
and closed and reopened as Mezzon de la prelin Mezse.
It's currently located at thirty seven Rue De's Arkieve. Yeah,

(27:13):
you can go, but you're going to get almonds and
you're going to get it old school style, not the
not the creamy version, but the candy version. But wait,
there is more, because there's a Belgian version of the
preline that is very different from the ones that we
have been talking about. And this version is pretty interesting.
It starts in a pharmacy with a name that you
might be familiar with if you are into Belgian chocolates,

(27:36):
and that is new House. Jean Newhouse was a pharmacist
in Brussels in the eighteen fifties with a shop in
the Gallery de la Rene. New House compounded medicines at
his pharmacy, but he also sold sweets, which were also homemade,
and in eighteen fifty seven he had a clever idea
he made little candies that were actually medicine, covering the

(27:58):
medicine with a chocolate coating to make it more palatable.
This was a hit with the customers, and chocolate coated
medicinal candies were sold in the pharmacy for decades. In
nineteen twelve, Jean Newhouse died and he left the business
to his grandson, Jean Newhouse Junior, and Jean had the
idea that they could start making candies, just straight candies

(28:20):
the same way they had been making medicine chocolates, but
all yummy sweet ingredients for that liquid filling instead of
some kind of bitter medicine, and Jean Junior borrowed the
word preleene for this concoction already known as the caramel
nut candy for the French almond version to name his
new chocolates. Initially, the company sold these Belgian pralines and

(28:43):
paper cones the way that you might get treats at
an outdoor stand or a festival to walk around with. Uh.
But that was a bit of a mismatch because the
chocolate candies with this delicious filling weren't the kind of
thing that you ate while just walking around. They were
too delicate to really be carried very far in a
cone without being damaged. So enter Louise Agostine, new House's wife.

(29:07):
She had the idea to sell these delicious chocolates in
a gift box, and the Ballotan was born. Today, Belgian
pralines are so very popular, and New House includes chocolates
in its lineup that are named for the company's early
beginnings and innovators. So for example, the Gallery is named
for the shopping center that housed that first shop, and

(29:28):
it has a dark chocolate exterior and a salted caramel finish,
but there are a range of flavor options for the filling.
The Jean has a filling ganache made with Peruvian cocoa.
It's very dark chocolate and a very rich flavor, and
the Louise has a milk chocolate ganache filling. The company
has continued to name chocolates after family members, as well

(29:49):
as royals and important moments both in its history and
global history. Now I want preleins, real bad anytime, the
Belgian kind, the New Orleans kind, any of the above.
So that's this installment of eponymous foods. And now I
have cute animals. Oh yay, listen, it's more popcorn. But

(30:11):
this dog really needs to be called out for its
weapons grade cuteness. Okay, this is from our listener Mary,
who writes, Hello, Holly and Tracy. I'm a longtime listener,
but I'm writing in for the first time to join
you in gushing over the fabulousness that is popcorn. I
am a popcorn fiend and a big reason why my
son is the top seller in his school's popcorn fundraiser

(30:33):
each year. I usually default to the convenience of microwave popcorn,
but your recent episode has inspired me to explore new
methods for making it. I also wanted to let you
know that yes, popcorn and soup is a thing, and
it is incredible. I had it on a trip to
Ecuador years ago, and apparently it's a common practice there.
The popcorn was definitely a little crunchier than typical US versions,

(30:55):
so it held up a bit better in the liquid.
I want to say it was a creamier too, but
I don't recall what kind exactly. It's very similar to
sprinkling crackers or crispy wanton on your soup just before
you take a bite, and it works just as well.
I highly recommend giving it a try sometime. Attached for
pet tax is a photo of my doxy mixed Pixie.

(31:16):
She is queen of all she surveys, as are most Docsin's,
but she is almost fifteen years old, so she mostly
surveys the couch these days. Thank you for your fun
and insightful podcast. I love listening to you both, and
I hope to see you next time you're in Atlanta
for a live show. Yours truly, Mary Okay. I wasn't
prepared for the scroll because Pixie is one of the

(31:36):
cutest dogs I've ever seen in my life, and that
is saying a lot. She has the sweetest face on
the planet. Yeah, she's blonde. She has these little supermodel
waves in her ears. Her eyes are very sweet. I'm
a little obsessed with Pixie. And she has this cute
little bandana on that's got flowers on it. She's so precious.

(31:57):
I like the little pink edge on the cutest, cutest,
our little face. I want to kiss it through the screen. Mary,
thank you for bringing Pixie into my life today. Also,
I've said it before, I'll see it again. I love
a mature pet the I love the old guys and
gals and their cuteness and how chill they become ready

(32:17):
for hugging and kissing at any moment. If you would
like to write to us share pictures of your pets,
mature or babies, I'll take them all. And as I've said,
almost any flavor is great. You can do that at
History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also subscribe
to the podcast. If you haven't gotten around to it
yet and think you might want you you can do

(32:38):
that on the iHeartRadio app, or anywhere you listen to
your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
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